So last night I had a hair cut appointment at 7 pm and at about 6:20 pm I remembered that I needed to change the IP address for one of my a name records for one of my machines. So I edited my zone file for that domain name, thinking it was going to be a typical IP address update, WRONG!

After updating the IP address I figure I have a little time to kill until I have to leave for my hair cut appointment, so I loaded up Halo for a little alien killing then at about 7:45 pm Julie reminds me that we need to leave. So we get in the car and head out for our hair cut appointment. At about 8:30 pm we then return home. Why did it take so long you ask? Well, you have to stop off at Dairy Queen on your way home if you're going to watch a DVD when you get home. Nothing is better than a pre-DVD Butterfinger Blizzard. So I had my Blizzard and I was all prepared to sit down and watch Friday Night Lights when while I'm letting the dog out Julie hands me the phone and says, "It's for you." And that's when the nightmare began...

"Yeah, Brent I can't seem to get my email or send email." So I'm thinking in my head, "Hmmm, wonder what he's doing wrong." Typical geek thinking, always the users fault, right! So I asked if he could get to websites on the internet and he said that he could get to all websites except for the ones on my server. That's when I started to panic a little bit. So I told him I would check it out and give him a call back.

So I headed on back to the computer room and start to check it out. I had left my email program up (Thunderbird) and sure enough send and receive errors showing in Thunderbird. Then I started receiving instant messages from friends and family that have e-mail on my server saying they where having problems. So I immediately knew it was my server and not an isolated incident.

Next I checked my websites, and nothing. Then I logged onto my co-location companies IRC server and asked if there were any network outages. Nope, notta... Finally, I figured out it was DNS that was down, so after digging through old emails I was able to find my IP address for the server which I couldn't remember because I never use it.

After getting logged into the server and restarting DNS, rebooting, checking the logs, etc, etc, etc, etc... I finally figured out that the problem steamed from up2date running a patch on Named which overwrote my /etc/named.conf file. Luckly, up2date creates a backup up of the config file and names it /etc/named.conf.rpmsave. So at about 1 am in the morning I finally got it working. I just made a backup of the current namd.conf file and then did a "cp named.conf.rpmsave named.conf" and then restarted Named and presto I had DNS!

I guess if I'm ever feeling unimportant I can just shut down e-mail on the server and wait for my phone to ring! :)